The woke have seized control of NYC’s ‘affordable housing’

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met last week with real-estate-industry leaders, he said, to discuss “the importance of us reducing the timeline of getting New Yorkers into affordable housing.”

I want New York City housing to be affordable, too. But I want it to be affordable to working- and middle-class people who pay taxes and respect the civic order. I don’t want the municipal treasury milked to provide cozy quarters for the drug-addled and insane who usually (as Mamdani is going to swiftly discover) prefer life on the street.

Unlike Mamdani’s fellow travelers in socialist sophistry — like former City Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan, who two years ago torpedoed plans for a large Harlem housing project for not being 100% “affordable” — I want rental apartments to be affordable to people who’ve earned them. And to a surprising extent not sufficiently acknowledged, many already are.

Let’s be clear: The word “affordable” as it’s commonly kicked around is entirely ideological. President Trump’s dismissal of the issue as a “hoax” and a “Democrat scam,” although not altogether baseless, missed the larger issue. “Affordable,” as Merriam-Webster defines it, means simply “able to be afforded.”

By that definition — the one that matters in the real world — New York City has objectively enjoyed great success in creating new rental apartments for the kinds of people I want as my neighbors.

NYU professor of urban policy and planning Mitchell L. Moss notes “affordable” once applied to “housing that middle-income households can afford.” Now the term is in service of the agenda to put up street thugs and lunatics at developers’ and taxpayers’ expense.

An astounding 331,430 new homes — the vast majority priced for middle-income tenants — were created in the five boroughs during three different mayoral administrations from 2010 through 2024, per the Department of City Planning. Rezonings, tax incentives and office-building conversions spurred the trend, which New Yorkers not flush enough for Billionaires’ Row but able to afford normal market rents embraced.

Many new projects include units that are “affordable” in a different, reasonable sense of the word: that is, priced lower than market-rate for law-abiding working people, some holding more than one job to make ends meet. That’s a laudable aspect of the phenomenon — although Mamdani’s heart is not with them but with derelicts and lawbreakers he calls merely “homeless.”

But overlooked in coverage of the relatively few bargain-priced units is that at least 75% of the new units were snatched up at market rates. That’s cause for celebration but entirely elided by leftist housing “advocates,” for whom no number or percentage of low-priced apartments in any given project is ever enough.

Whole new skylines have popped up in Long Island City and Hunter’s Point in Queens, in Downtown Brooklyn, in Gowanus and on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue and along the Harlem River in The Bronx.

Moss tells The Post: “What makes New York City different from other cities is the speed with which we have created entirely new residential enclaves in old industrial corridors like Long Island City, Greenpoint, the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, as well as in what was once Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan and in Sunset Park and Red Hook.”

The new residences sprang up even before the Adams administration’s “City of Yes” initiatives that will dramatically accelerate residential growth — up to 100,000 more apartments over the next five years, according to city planners.

“I believe we will see a dramatic increase in affordable residential units just by removing needless obstacles to small-scale housing,” Moss says. Among them, Adams’ team managed to reduce the City Council’s leverage in housing affairs, so a single member’s “no” vote can no longer kill a plan that needs even the least city approval.

Development that suits the needs of middle-income New Yorkers is typified at the Monarch, a 24-story rental building at 163-05 Archer Ave. in Jamaica, Queens. The tower, a short stroll to the LIRR station, has 605 apartments. Some 182 are earmarked for people earning between 80% and 130% of median area income.

But 70% of the apartments rent at higher market rates — which multiplied by the hundreds of new buildings with similar rent structures translates into many thousands of new homes for middle-class tenants in all five boroughs.

But Mamdani, like most leftist ideologues, hates “gentrification,” which they regard as uprooting of lower-income people (which almost never happens) for “the rich.” An essay in the Harlem View blog, for example, said Jamaica’s ongoing transformation “stirs fear that Jamaica’s longstanding cultural and small-business identity is at risk of fading.”

But the obverse perception is that it brings job-holding taxpayers and the benefits of family life to neighborhoods previously given over to criminals, drug dealers and empty storefronts.

The Monarch, developed by black-owned BRP Companies, boasts a fitness center, golf simulators, pickleball courts, rooftop lounge and dog run. A close friend of mine moved there from the Upper East Side. Her French bulldog has room to run, and her windows look down on a neighborhood revitalized beyond anyone’s dream.

This is what “affordable” housing should mean — not that Zohran Mamdani is likely to understand.